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Configuring Wine Layer On Ubuntu

Wine is a program with that you can make Windows programs run in Linux system. Wine is not an emulator (hence the name, in true GNU recursive style), but it does provide an alternative, 100-percent-non-Microsoft implementation of the DLLs that Windows programs use. (Wine can also use actual Windows DLLs as well.) The software has been in development for more than 12 years and just reached beta status in the fall of 2005. But Wine has been in widespread use for quite some time, and it’s included in most distributions, including Ubuntu.

The Wine software included with Ubuntu is frequently at least a step behind the current version, so to run the latest version you’ll want to edit your /etc/apt/sources.list file and add Wine’s own apt repository. You can do so manually, or with the Synaptic Package Manager.

To add the line yourself, open Terminal and enter this command:

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

After you furnish your password, the nano editor will open sources.list. Enter this line at the end of the file:

deb http://wine.sourceforge.net/apt binary/

Save the file (press Ctrl-O), then close, open Terminal again and run:

$ sudo apt-get update

This will update the package cache. Now you can install Wine with the command:

sudo apt-get install wine

Now its time to configure the new installation, for that run the following command at the terminal.

winecfg

It’s generally fine to accept the defaults, but you may find it helpful to add a new Windows drive (via the Drives tab) that explicitly maps to your CD-ROM drive. To do so, click the Add button to create a new Windows D drive, and then click Browse to select the path to your CD-ROM (such as /media/cdrom0/). Finally, click the Apply button to finish.

There’s one more thing you should attend to before you begin to install Windows apps, and that is to install Microsoft TrueType fonts (so applications running in Wine can render text correctly) and cabextract, a useful tool for extracting the contents of Microsoft .cab archives. You can install both packages via apt by issuing this command in Terminal: